The
Lord blessed us with a wonderful Wednesday Evening Supper, Fellowship, and Bible
Study. The fellowship was sweet and the study was provoking and challenging.
Last Sunday I preached on the theme, "We are not in Kansas anymore".
Symbolically speaking we live in Babylon, a foreign place which is not our true
home.
Most of
you must know that I love to travel. The Book of Daniel is a divine travel guide for
pilgrims who are passing through Babylon. Daniel is a great theological book, whose
primary subject is not Daniel, nor is it Nebuchadnezzar the king. The proper
subject of the Book of Daniel is God. The people of God had been taken captive
and were in exile in Babylon. It was the place of exile, the place of
loneliness, and the place of testing
In the
Bible, Babylon is not only that place where Nimrod sought to build a tower to
reach to heaven; it is not only the place where God dispersed mankind by
dividing them into different languages; it is not only the capitol of the
Chaldean Empire in ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq); nor is Babylon only a
real place for Daniel. In the Bible, Babylon is a metaphor for every group and
every condition that threatens faith in the hearts of God's people. For this
reason Peter would speak of writing from Babylon in 1 Peter
5:13,
though presumably he was really writing from Rome. In Revelation, the Lord
speaks of the final enemies of Christ as Babylon. The place where our faith is
under attack, the place of antagonism for the gospel, the place to which we are
led that seems alien to our faith—that is Babylon.
The
good news of the Book of Daniel is that God is also in Babylon. God is with us
in the hard places of life. God is in the prison with us. God is in the
antagonistic classroom with us. God is in the wicked workplace. He is in the
unbelieving home. Furthermore, in Daniel God doesn't minimize the pain of
Babylon; He reveals it as it truly is.
Discipleship is not always as clean as we would
like it to be, but if our goal is to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ,
and if God is in control, then we can trust Him that He knows what He is doing.
We can believe that even when we have been encircled by Babylonians, God is
there. If we are His, then we can trust Him. We can know that He intends for us
to follow Him through it all.
We
are called and sent to be be the living testimonies for God, whatever our
situation or station. In the very hard places of life where we are led, the
mysterious places where we don't understand why the innocent suffer or why we
suffer, small decisions are made to trust Christ regardless. Thus, it is in
those places that we become living testimonies for others. Babylon,
an evil
place, a place of paganism, became for one tried and true young man a place
where other disciples were made. Daniel was a great evangelist although he was
in a foreign land. Daniel was a great theologian who taught others about God
although he was a slave. Daniel was a leader while he was just a lad. In
Babylon Daniel stirred up the faith of his friends who would later need strong
faith themselves. Ultimately Daniel witnessed to a pagan king.
This
reminds me of Paul who, as he was in prison in Rome, wrote to the Philippians to
encourage them about his situation: "I want you to know, brothers, that what has
happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become
known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my
imprisonment is for Christ" (Philippians
1:12-13).
Through
faith in Christ, the hard places of life become sacred
places.
In
Christ,
Brown
